A three-year, $900,000 grant from the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation will enable Colorado Public Radio to add an arts news bureau and website, intended to “significantly increase arts coverage of the Denver/Boulder metro area and across the state.”

The goal of the grant announced Wednesday is multimedia arts coverage, with text and video complementing radio reports.

“Arts news will range from previews and in-depth stories about major cultural and arts organizations, to funding and sustainability of the arts, and connections to other topic areas such as education and state government,” a CPR release noted. “Reviews, interviews, audio and video performances and events calendars will all be part of the online arts hub.”

“It will connect to all three of our music services, news, classical and new music,” according to CPR’s Sean Nethery, SVP of programming.

Three-full time staffers will be hired, an arts editor and two full-time reporters (one specializing in broadcast, the other in digital content). Content will also come from classical and new-music experts from CPR’s two music services (in Denver, classical on KCFR 90.1 FM and KVOD 88.1 and new music on Open Air 1340 AM).

This grant for arts coverage represents the third major philanthropic underwriting of news at CPR, after health and education.

Joanne Ostrow has been watching TV since before "reality" required quotation marks. "Hill Street Blues" was life-changing. If Dickens, Twain or Agatha Christie were alive today, they'd be writing for television. And proud of it.